Mobile phones have become ubiquitous in today's digital world. Many people rely on their mobile phone to perform a whole host of varying tasks such as making phone calls, checking email, capturing digital photographs and digital video, reading news on the Internet, playing games, and so forth. The mobile phone has become the Swiss Army knife of hand-held electronics.
Still, the range of tasks that can be performed with today's smart phones (e.g., the Apple™ iPhone, or Google™ Android-based phones) is limited to the hardware supplied with the phones. For example, most phones today come with an integrated CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensor to capture pictures or video. Some phones may include a flash device (e.g., an LED flash module) to illuminate a scene. Further, many phones have internal accelerometers or gyroscopes that provide feedback about the motion of the phone. While these and other sensors enable a wide range of applications to be implemented in software on these phones, some applications require hardware that is not readily available within any existing mobile hand-held devices. Thus, there is a need for addressing this issue and/or other issues associated with the prior art.